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Battery Life

Inside the Kogan Agora 4G is a non-removable 9.5 Wh (2,500 mAh, 3.8 V) lithium-ion battery, which paired with a Snapdragon 400 SoC inside should be a reasonably potent battery combination. We’re not talking about Snapdragon 801 efficiency, but the cell included in this handset is larger than we’ve typically seen with mid-range or entry-level handsets, which should deliver decent battery life.

In our standard video playback test that we’ve been performing for a number of years, the Agora 4G records a very respectable score of 10 hours. This places it in the company of the HTC One M8 and LG G3 flagships, with battery life 32% better than the 2013 Moto G, and just a few minutes behind the HTC Desire 816, which is also powered by a Snapdragon 400 SoC

Performance in our Wi-Fi and 4G browsing tests was lower than expected, indicating BenQ hasn't put much effort in to optimizing the device's battery life.

Thanks to a fairly large battery and the low power requirements of the Snapdragon 400, the Agora 4G will last a long time in heavy 3D gaming. GFXBench recorded no degradation of performance of the course of the benchmark, indicating performance isn’t being throttled over a long session of gaming.

The Agora 4G comes with a five watt charger in the box, which theoretically could charge the handset in just under 90 minutes (if it were 100% efficient and delivering constant max power). In actual fact the device charges fully in around two hours from a more powerful ten watt charger, which is typical for this sort of smartphone.

BenQ has added in some advanced power management tools to the Agora 4G’s software stack, allowing you to conserve power by limiting the times the phone can access data. In the power management settings, you can set certain times which are classed as ‘off-peak’ that will dictate when data can be disabled when the display is off. There’s also an ‘aggressive’ mode which simply disables data at any time when the screen is off.